Pulsar glitches

A glitch in the data of the Crab pulsar.
It occurred in March 2003 and is the largest detected glitch on this pulsar.
However, it is small compared to the glitches observed in Vela-like pulsar, which
are about 1,000 times larger.
Check the paper for more details.

Pulsars are famous for their very stable rotation, provided by their high
density and rapid spin.
Pulsar timing, the method by which the rotation of pulsars is measured
and described, is a high precision discipline.
This accuracy makes it possible to detect and measure very small perturbations
affecting the normal rotation of the star.

Glitches are rare events of very short duration, seen in the data
as sudden jumps in rotational frequency. Following a glitch, the pulsar
sometimes enters a stage of recovery, in which the rotation frequency decays
towards the pre-glitch value.

The catalogue contains basic glitch information on all published glitches plus
regularly updated detections using the Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank Observatory
(view the table).

For each glitch, its epoch and the frequency and frequency
derivative fractional steps are given. Epochs are given in Modified Julian Days (MJD),
frequency fractional steps are given in units of 10-9 and frequency
derivative fractional steps in units of 10-3.
The last column of the table indicates the origin of the values and
whether the glitch appears in other publications.

Unless otherwise stated in the last column, values in the table
are estimated as described in Espinoza et al. (2011).

You can also access the
original table from the paper. This (online) version includes two extra columns containing the frequency
jumps (in micro Hz) used for the calculations in the paper and the frequency derivative jumps
(in units of 10-15 Hz s-1).